His Dark Materials stills up

[prog]

colorwheel notes that some publicity stills of The Golden Compass are available. Either they are rushing to public with them, before letting their FX people drop some daemons into the shots, or the film treatment is mangling how the daemons are supposed to work. ("You can only see them when they want to be seen" or some shit.) Look here I'm already being a HOW DARE YOU CHANGE ANYTHING fanboy but for christ I'd think this particular point pretty damn important, wouldn't you?

I hope the films are so good that I'll be bawlin my eyes out at the very last scene of the last film. Which is, now that I think of it, maybe one of my favorite ending-endings I've ever read.

Also if I randomly punch you in the face sometime it's because I used my Bene Gesserit training to foresee that at some point in the future you'd say "The name's Asriel. Lord Asriel. Hurr hurr hurr. Because it's James Bond get it?"

Comments

my best line from the 80s

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

Bene Gesserit, eh? who do you think are? the cuisinart hat rack?

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

i know a lot of people are stoked, but i have to say i don't get His Dark Materials. i read the first and half of the second.

come to think of it, i didn't read all the dunes either.

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

I heard the daemons are going to have organic web shooters. L A M E

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

as much as i love his dark materials and would thrill at a good movie version, i have my doubts that chris weitz would be able to pull this off. one of the things that really struck me about the HDM books was how well pullman dealt with class, and, well...i have this fear that weitz (who really doesn't do class well) would cast mike white and tim blake nelson as the gyptians. plus, he's not a very interesting director visually.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

See, I have very specific opinions about Pullman's writing. I thought _The Golden Compass_ was the first book of a really brilliant and insightful fantasy trilogy, but then Pullman wasn't able to write that trilogy and came out with _The Subtle Knife_ and _The Amber Spyglass_ instead. I'd say you should stop with _TGC_, but I can't even go that far; once Pullman spun out, it became obvious that he never had any idea where he was going, and was just throwing random implications around.

So my big hope for the movie is that someone -- and I really don't care whether it's Pullman -- is able to come up with a completely new ending. Ideally, one synthesized from the elements of _TGC_.